A story about land clearing, ecological damage and restoration in Western Australia. But it's also a story of physical and spiritual healing that includes whitefellas and the land's original inhabitants - the Noongar people.

Transcript

MUSIC: Sculthorpe String Quartets 'To Meadows'

Bill Bunbury: You're with Encounter on ABC Radio National. I'm Bill Bunbury and this week, a program I've called 'Taking Down the Fences'.

Eugene Eades: My name is Eugene Eades. I'm a Noongar man from Noongar country. My job is to engage Noongar people with connection to country to come back on country as elders and as families, to look at the land and to take down all the old fences that used to belong to the property. Once we've taken the fences down, then we look at the landscape of our in the past, what type of vegetation was on that land, that provided a habitat for animals that was connected to Noongar people in the past.

Peter Luscombe: Yes, any sort of boundaries, artificial boundaries, don't go well in nature, and just to open it up by taking away the fence is really quite symbolic really. To take that away is a great feeling. I can liken to what happened in Germany, taking down the Wall; it's very much the same feeling. It's just opened up a whole new potential for people to interact and to become integrated into the landscape. It's the same with its people or wildlife, it's all the same, we're all part of it.

Bill Bunbury: Former farmer and now native seed grower, Peter Luscombe, and Noongar leader, Eugene Eades, who runs an environmental training centre at Nowergup in bush country east of Albany.

Their experience is part of a story about land clearing in the South East of Western Australia, the ecological damage it did, and restoration of some of that land.

But it's not just an ecological story. It's a journey that has brought both respect for the Noongar feeling for country and also what some Wadjelas, (whitefellers), have come to see as an ethic where land is concerned; an ethic that involves care for country and spiritual as well as physical restoration for people who took part and still are taking part in healing country.

For a long time even after European settlement much of this country in South East W.A. remained pristine bushland, with great biodiversity of both plants and animals.

But after World War Two the State government urged farmers to clear and develop this vast region. Their boast? A million acres a year under the plough.

Keith Bradby: You know, from 1948 to '69, West Australians opened up for farming about a million acres a year, and farmed it, cleared it. I came in '76, the ongoing clearing was still happening.

Peter Luscombe: In the late '60s everybody was just developing what was called then virgin land, which is what we would call biodiverse ecosystems, was being turned into farmland, and that was very common. The effect was devastating as far as the natural landscape went. It was just about like a 90% change in species and systems. But the natural systems broke down, basically.

Keith Bradby: I saw that era when whole paddocks were drifting, when roads were getting covered in grit sand, when some of the areas that started off with more than 50 settlers were down to 5 or 10, and a lot of those people have left painfully. We saw in the south coast region, the serious beginnings of salinity, of swathes of dead saline flats, hovering above the precious National Park areas and so on. And you saw what had been a biologically very full landscape, become a very empty landscape. And even now, you drive through it and you've got half a dozen plant species, which are the ones who farm; you've barely got half a dozen farmers left, because each farmer who would be looking at 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 hectares to make their living, and that means a long way between homesteads. So you've gone from very full to empty and getting emptier.

Bill Bunbury: Keith Bradby, later to found Gondwanalink, a restoration plan for this damaged region. And before him, Peter Luscombe, one of many farmers who saw the damage and did something about it.

Sylvia Leighton, as a child, remembers the optimism of the early days of 'taming' new country.

Sylvia Leighton: Everybody was in the same boat. We all lived in these tin sheds, we were all burning bush, ploughing, raking up roots and everyday life for me as a child was really just going out with the family with the tractor and trailer and just picking up mallee roots all day long, and then covered in charcoal and dirt. So no, you had no concept of that, and every other child that I mixed with, was living the same life. We were all clearing land together.

But I do think a child's perspective is very different to the adults. The adults were very excited and having very strong camaraderie about pioneering the land and for the kids it was a different experience.

Annie Brandenberg: My experiences of picking mallee roots every May school holiday, or thinking about the little animals, the dunnarts that we used to see scurrying around trying to run for cover under these mallee roots and knowing that they were going to get burnt to smithereens by the end of the day. But at the same time seeing the beauty, and all those rows and rows of mallee roots glowing at night. It was really a lovely sight, but such devastation.

Peter Luscombe: With these fires, especially on fragmented bushland, basically it expelled a lot of wildlife out of these little areas and they weren't able to re-colonise very quickly because they were isolated, becoming more and more isolated, these patches. And so there was a complete breakdown of wildlife and we ended up just having the more common species across the landscape.

Susanne Dennings: The bush, it was just progress in those days, and a lot of those fires that were lit, they often burnt them and then cleared them, and some of those fires that got away just kept going to the coast, so burnt huge swathes of remnant vegetation.

Bill Bunbury: And presumably the flora and fauna with it?

Susanne Dennings: Exactly, yes, and I think that's where my mother used to come in and feeling for all the animals, and that was her concern, what was being lost.

Bill Bunbury: In a way too, farming lost out as a result, didn't it?

Susanne Dennings: Certainly, yes. When we look around on this particular farm coming up for 100 years, on our family property here, huge signs of salinity and we're paying the price now for over-clearing and the farming systems that we adopted, the English farming systems that we've adopted and put in to Australia.

Bill Bunbury: Susanne Dennings, with Annie Brandenberg and Sylvia Leighton, both daughters of new land settlers.

It wasn't long before Peter Luscombe began to feel uneasy about what was happening to country.

Peter Luscombe: Right at the onset, it just didn't quite feel right, ploughing in biodiversity. Sometimes on a tractor with a machine behind you, trying to avoid some species because it just looked too good to plough in, that was often the case. Yes, it was pretty strong feeling right from the beginning, that it didn't quite feel like it could be justified for what was being produced.

Bill Bunbury: Steve Newbey's family had farmed in this region for a very long time. But as a child he can remember a sudden expansion of farming in the region in the 1960s.

Steve Newbey: A lot of people came in at that time and took up the Mallee country around the old woodland area that we lived on that was close to Ongerup, and those people, you know, their parents were train-drivers, schoolteachers, shopkeepers, and they weren't necessarily from farming backgrounds. There were quite a few people who also came in from South Australia, who had farming backgrounds.

Ross Williams: I grew up on a farm in South Australia and it was pretty evident to me that my father talking about the floods in the 1940s, they'd left some quite devastating creek lines through the property, and they were not really inclined to do any conservation work with that devastated areas and when I came to Western Australia in 1968, I was fortunate enough to get some land.

Bill Bunbury: Farmer Ross Williams, later to work closely with Gondwanalink in restoring country.

Ross Williams: I was very determined at that point not to see my property get to a state where it was eroded in such a form as that. The original clearing on most of my neighbour's were of the war service and they pretty well cleared the creek lines and did all of that, and we noticed erosion coming out of those areas.

Steve Newbey: Unsustainable farming practices, working the land multiple times, the land had been over-cleared, there was erosion taking place, salinity occurring, all of the problems associated with unsustainable farming. When I was younger I probably even contributed to it more. I can remember clearing a few small areas on the farm, less than a hectare each, because I was greedy and wanted more land. Those areas in the end, I planted some of them back to trees.

Sylvia Leighton: We went through the time of clearing land, seeing the pastures, meaning those for the third or fourth or fifth year, overstocking in summer and all blowing away and having dust storms. I mean you'd have sometimes fires, summer fires, come through, paddocks looking incredibly bare, a lot of the remnant bush that we had left in paddocks was all just dying off. Again, the lack of knowledge that we all went into farming out in those area, the government just provided very little information. So nobody had any idea of the fragility of the soils. We weren't advised that you had to de-stock in summer and provide supplementary feed. That knowledge came as we learnt from our mistakes and saw our sheep starving during summer. So there were those early years after the district had been cleared for eight or nine years, suddenly with the overstocking of the paddocks, the series of dust storms in summer, it started to be recognised, 'We've got to change the way we farm here; you can't keep on having too many stock on the pastures in summer'.

Kingsley Vaux: We used to have a boat and cruise around here with the Noongar kids. There were about 10 or 12 of us sometimes out here, building our own rafts and chasing all the ducks and that.

Bill Bunbury: You're with Encounter on ABC Radio National, and I'm with Kingsley Vaux, a Pingerup farmer, in South East W.A. and we're looking at the remains of a lake. It's now sadly shrunk from Kingsley's childhood days on the family farm.

Kingsley Vaux: It has deteriorated. Yes. The perimeter has actually got a little bit thinner over the last 10 or 15 years. Yes.

Bill Bunbury: What's it feel like, seeing it in this state now, looking as barren as it does, compared to how you remember it?

Kingsley Vaux: Oh, it's sad isn't it, yes. If it was within my power I'd be trying to fix it, but I don't really know how to do it. The rest of the land around is still in reasonable good health, but when you get floods, a lot of water runs down here and then that breaks off and it does leach a bit of the salt out of the surrounding land and come down here, and then of course the salt's left behind, and when this dries out, it'll be white crystals over the mud there.

Bill Bunbury: When did your awareness of the way the land was changing really develop? Was it things like this, looking at this lake?

Kingsley Vaux: I guess it was. Yes. I've always been in touch with the land, I guess, but I guess when I came home from school in Perth, I noticed changes and then of course as I took over on the farm, a bit more of an eagle eye on the land and where our dollar came from, so I was taking more notice. It's been happening for quite a long time.

Bill Bunbury: Kingsley Vaux and the symptoms of land decay.For many Noongar people land clearing in this region in the 1960s wasn't just something they witnessed. Their status at that time meant they became part of the process.

Eugene Eades.

Eugene Eades: I can remember growing up on the native reserve and seeing many of the Noongar families, the menfolk in particular, being picked up by the farmers and they'd be taking them out each day to the farmland to do sucker-bashing, cutting down all the young suckers and clearing the way for the change to be grubbed through by two big bulldozers or tractors at the time, and after that, it goes through they'd come down with the plough and plough all the mallee stumps up. So then they'd employ the Noongar people to go out and pick the mallee stumps, heave them up and then burn them.

Bill Bunbury: How much choice was there for people then in terms of jobs of work?

Eugene Eades: It was very difficult times. I mean if you didn't go out to work, well then the only way you could by then was to go to the local Native Welfare office and apply for a ration. And that ration would be no more in those days of being something like $30 to get you through 14 days or 9 days or 10 days to the next time when it was due and that was basically the only backup you had to refusing to go to work because of your connection to country and your respect for the land.

Bill Bunbury: When you think about that clearing, this must have changed the map wouldn't it? I mean you knew where country was, but suddenly the country was less recognisable?

Eugene Eades: Yes, look; we're going back in time to when we had our old people had trails throughout the Stirlings and throughout the Porongorups, and throughout this country. It was the dreaming trails, and the trails where they had different locations set aside to teach our young men and our young women about how to care for country, teaching about the way to best respect the land and all that lives on the land.

Bill Bunbury: And those trails disappeared?

Eugene Eades: So the work I'm involved with now, we're finding those trails, which is great. We call them trails today, the cultural corridors. The cultural corridors concept is one of the ways where we're using that as a vehicle to take our young men and our young women back down to learn them about the cultural values of this country.

Sylvia Leighton: There was an old wagon track that went through the back of our block, and you can assume that some of the old tracks that were put in, in the early days, did follow Noongar trails. But the bush on the block of land my parents had, was very thick, it was heathland. So again for Noongar people to move through it, they'd either have to stick on these well-worn tracks or follow kangaroo trails or possibly just burn it every few years just so they could move through it, because it's very thick.

Eugene Eades: And in this particular area of the land was in the State of Western Australia, it was prime country which is great country for farming and running sheep and cattle and grain, everybody was out there with their dog, trying to take up land. And as a result of it, it could have been an honest mistake, that whilst they were gathering up the Aboriginal people to partake in some of the work that was going on, clearing land, the early settlers may not have recognised that through the clearing that was going on, dragging those big logs, having horses each side of it and having the Noongar elders driving those horses, dragging those logs over country and over sites of significant to the Noongar people, over ceremony grounds, over birthing places, places which were used as bush universities to teach the young people about cultural values in the past. And in amongst all that dragging the log and driving the horses, there was this destruction taking place, destroying the Noongar food, fruit and medicinal plants. Today we're down in small numbers with what's left due to the clearing and all that went on in those days.

Keith Bradby: My first realisation I think was how roughly and carelessly we had treated this part of the world, and I came at the tail-end of the million acres a year era, when the government was actually trying to kick-start it again. And a few years on from that, you appreciate how totally inappropriate that was, on all fronts, from a farmer viewpoint, from an ecological viewpoint, and socially disastrous.

Bill Bunbury: Keith Bradby, convinced that both land and people needed healing.

Keith Bradby: And what next for us was to work with the farmers on the origins of the Landcare movement, work with the ecologists and the concerned members of the community on the biological values of this place and what it needs, and I'll be honest, that after 15 years of that, I think we'd achieved a lot, but nowhere near as much as we need to achieve. So we start searching for what is the next big lift that this landscape and society needs. And it is being able to think across a thousand or two kilometres and across a thousand or two years, to what is health in this landscape, what is vitality in this landscape. And it's a lot more than looking after rare species or propping up farms with a few belts of trees. It is stitching the health back together and it is bringing it, and its values and its needs into our culture. Gondwanalink is the vehicle that we think helps us do that here, and helps us appreciate both the need and the ability to do that nationally.

Bill Bunbury: We're standing in what is, in effect, the ruins of a farming settlement, aren't we? There's an old dunny outside, the sheds are in neglect, the house makes you marvel how people actually lived here for so long, gaping holes in this verandah where we're standing. It says something I suppose about the stoicism of people of persisting in the land where in fact things were going wrong.

Simon Smale: Yes well it certainly gives a new meaning to the term 'resilience'. I think the resilience of some of the occupants, the inhabitants of this landscape is really quite extraordinary.

Simon Smale: One of our objectives through this project is just through building ecological resilience, and seeing what we can do to arrest the decline that's happening in a whole range of environmental indicators to move towards this thing called sustainability, a word that rolls easily off the tongue, but actually understanding what that means in real terms on the ground, in terms of farming operations and other active economic land use activities, is still a great challenge for us. We're working very closely with the Noongar community, obviously, so alongside the ecological restoration we're also working with the Noongar people to re-establish cultural connections, we're talking about things like cultural corridors and so on. But of course that principle also applies to the Wadjela communities, the European communities who live in these landscapes as well. It's surprising sometimes to see just how long people will remain in a landscape, living a pretty tough lifestyle, just because of that that connection to land and landscape.

Eugene Eades: And in this part of the country, there were three clans, there was Koorang, Menang, and Weelmun. In traditional times, those three clans interacted in the ways of sharing and caring and looking after each other. Now to make sure there was going to be tucker on the table for the young people, under-elders throughout those seasons, and there were six seasons.

The first one was Birak, it would come about in December to February, and in that season there was goanna and the goanna eggs. There was also fruit which is called chuk, is a fruit high in Vitamin C; pane, another one high in Vitamin C and there were tubers as well, potatoes, and the mungart, the yam tree, had seeds that would be collected and grounded to make the flour for damper. The wattles were also there as well, with seeds that would be grounded for flour as well. That was one of the seasons that the old people shared in as they journeyed through the landscape. Far and wide they would go.

Keith Bradby: The Noongar folk we've worked with in this part of Gondwanalink, have such depth to them and so statesmanlike in their views of these issues and I think that's possibly the greatest remaining testimonial to their long tenure in this country. Pure decency and social justice is why we had to engage with the Noongar and Gnardju and Wongai people. It's their country.

The spinoffs though have been a bit intriguing. Let's be honest, you sit down with a bunch of hard-core ecological scientists, early on in the piece, and they say, 'Why are you doing this? This could detract from the main mission'. It probably has. Good, I hope it's changed the main mission forever. The spinoffs you get are a whole heap of people who want to be reconnected and re-engaged with their country and have been pushed off it, coming back, so the social fabric is changing significantly. It often seems that the European farmers can't retire to the cities quick enough for their own liking, and you have this bunch of Noongar people in Albany and Perth and Katanning, who just can't get back out there quickly enough, so that's a good balance.

There have been a number of very emotional moments when Wadjela, whitefella visitors have come face-to-face with Noongar culture, and had a glimpse in to Noongar culture, but also into what we as white people have done to Noongar culture and people in the last 100 years. And if you want to understand resilience, just look at the fact that the Noongar is still persisting and able to recover in the face of the last 100 years. So there's these depths of understanding and connection happening, but I think the longer one to me is that we have to face up to the fact that our Western religions, our Western cultures, have failed to incorporate the health of the planet, and the other occupants of the planet. Whereas - and I don't want to sound simplistic about it, but Noongar culture, Gnardju, Wongai, a lot of the traditional cultures' way of looking at the world at least embraces the surroundings, the country and the environment, and we have to learn that. And in our interactions down this way with the Noongar people, I see my colleagues and friends starting to learn that.

Susanne Dennings: Yes, I think sadly we didn't ask. I mean the Noongar people could have shown us a lot, I think, in past times. We didn't ask, we came over in our arrogance of English ways, and felt that we knew how to do it, and we've paid the price.

Simon Smale: We're also working with the Noongar people to re-establish cultural connections; we're talking about things like cultural corridors and so on, but of course that principle also applies to the Wadjela communities, the European communities who live in these landscapes as well.

Sylvia Leighton: We'd been farming on the block probably for about eight or nine years, and a wildfire came in from the neighbours' and we had to go down to the very back of the block, which we really hadn't explored at all, it was still all pristine, beautiful bush. My father was down there with a bulldozer, and came across this beautiful creek with all these permanent pools, and that was our first discovery that we had this gorgeous creek running through the back of the block. So yes, to have a waterway revealed to you five or six years after living there, is quite extraordinary in this day and age. It was a place too, where we'd go for our family picnics or a day off that we had from doing farmwork, we'd all go off down there and have a swim and that's when you were given the opportunity to just sit in nature and relax and enjoy it.

Ross Williams: I could see then the bigger picture, not just of my farm but for the whole area and the region that we really needed to concentrate on growing the diversity and the linkages between the areas of bushland that we have, not only for the animals and the birds that we do have, but also for vegetation reasons, that it was important to link the corridors and keep things intact as much as we could.

Steve Newbey: I stopped some of what I considered were unsustainable farming practices, like we used to fallow, which destroyed the soil structure, and we used to - my grandfather before me, used to burn, which I thought was contributing to the lack of carbons in the soil, which was very important, and vegetable matter.

Kingsley Vaux: This is an area that was showing signs of salt in, oh gee, it goes back when the first trees were planted here when the kids were babies. The outer rows were planted 18 years ago. We originally planted them for fence posts and just firewood, just to try and combat the salinity that was moving in some areas, and we've effectively done that. So the salinity's almost disappeared in this area. And then we thought, 'Oh well, the trees have done really well, we'll do another few rows, so we've got an ongoing supply of either firewood or posts or whatever'. And then we got to the centre, and we thought, 'Mmm, these sandalwood sound like a great idea'. We've planted bottles and we've planted sandalwood in the middle here, and we've actually harvested two years in a row now, the sandalwood seed off some of these.

Bill Bunbury: To my eye, it looks absolutely beautiful, it looks like how the country should be; is that your feeling?

Kingsley Vaux: Yes, if you didn't want to make too much money on this. Yes. No. It's stablised it. Look, we've got white gum, which doesn't really grow in this region but they seem to be doing reasonably well. We've got sugar gum, I planted it for firewood.

Bill Bunbury: So it's pretty practical as well as just aesthetic, isn't it? You're getting sandalwood and firewood out of restoring country?

Kingsley Vaux: Yes, well if we hadn't have done anything we'd have lost it to salt. Yes, it's a great place to come in the summertime too, around here in the green.

Peter Luscombe: The feeling just grew stronger and stronger, and especially when the governments talked about releasing huge areas of land extra to what had already been alienated, and that really drove me to stand up and make a bit of noise.

Bill Bunbury: Were you popular?

Peter Luscombe: Not really. Anyone who opposed that, any government initiative, wasn't viewed very well. Well I started collecting native seed and found a market for native seed for various uses, and once someone said to me 'Money doesn't grow on trees', well I was able to prove them wrong immediately, and my business grew from there, and that really allowed the possibility of getting into revegetation work, and local seed mixes for revegetation.

Bill Bunbury: Peter Luscombe.

Susanne Dennings grew up in the Gnowangerup district but went away for 20 years. She returned to find that the mallee fowl, a common enough in her childhood, was now a threatened species.

Susanne Dennings: The mallee fowl was actually our Noongar Aboriginal emblem for the Gnowangerup shire, Gnowangerup translating as 'The place of the mallee hen'. We started this group in '92, we didn't know there were many left, started out on a block just up from here, went out in the bush on the back of a ute, and went from there.

Bill Bunbury: Why was this bird so threatened?

Susanne Dennings: Well as farmers of course, we've taken away most of the good habitat.

Bill Bunbury: When were you aware of this first, of this bird which is unique to this area, was no longer around in the numbers that you had seen it?

Susanne Dennings: I think we've all become aware of everything that's disappeared. I remember seeing the last dingo at five years old, and I remember killing the last of the emus with the family, you know, you watch those things decline, but on the way to school we always used to see the mallee hen and often the mallee hen would run across in front of us, but of course that doesn't happen any more.

Bill Bunbury: Now you mentioned it as a symbol of the area, but it's also in a way a symbol of land conservation and the flora and fauna that go with it.

Susanne Dennings: It is an iconic species if the bush still in good condition, mallee fowls there, they disappeared, then it's one of the triggers that we notice, and I think the mallee hen is so obvious, I even saw one this morning, first time out in the crop. The mallee hen was there early this morning to cheer me up for the day, so that was a buzz this morning.

Bill Bunbury: Now what's been the effect on animal life. Has that come back as you've revegetated?

Kingsley Vaux: Oh definitely, yes. In fact there is an area across the other side of the road where we re-veged. We planted a prostrate wattle called Redolens. We had a lupin crop growing there, and the lupins failed and we realised something funny was going on here, so we fenced it off, we could see it was going salt, so it was bare, more or less, nothing growing on it at all, and we came to these wattles and then within four years we had blue wrens nesting in the wattle, so that was a real buzz for me to see that, come from nothing to little rare, well rare for us.

Simon Smale: One of the most wonderful things about the ecological restoration is just the extent to which the healing of country is a healing mechanism for people as well. It's an extraordinarily satisfying and rewarding thing for people to be involved in. And one of the surprising things about it is that those dividends are returned in relatively short time. You talk to any of the volunteers, the landholder groups, the land key groups, who are engaged in this sort of work, and that's the driver for them, seeing results, seeing wildlife return, birdlife returning, just feeling that these landscapes are rebirthing, they're coming alive again.

Eugene Eades: Yes, look, if you've got a healthy body, you've got a healthy mind and a healthy spirit. Once you've got the healthy spirit, then you can make the right decisions.

Ross Williams: Oh definitely yes. The benefits on our farm have just outweighed any costs. On my particular property I've got 30% under vegetation, either native vegetation that was left as uncleared land, or trees that we've planted in corridors for birds and animals and windbreaks. Look, there is just untold benefits. The land that is in native vegetation or under deep-rooted perennials, is just a bonus to all of our farming operation.

Bill Bunbury: Has it made your farming more interesting, do you think, doing it like this?

Ross Williams: Yes, I would say so. While it's more difficult to crop and farm around pieces of bush that you fenced out, it still is a more interesting environment to work in, and when you notice that the little birds and animals are there all the time buzzing in and out, and eating the blowflies and bugs that come along into the crops, I think it's just a huge benefit from the way we've gone.

Keith Bradby: One of the intriguing questions is always why are you doing this sort of work at all, why are you spending your life this way? And I have been pondering that the last few years, and to me, it goes to two critical things that my parents supplied. One was a strong sense of ethics, which in their case was caring for neighbours and the war widows that Victoria was full of at the time, and the other one was a love of country, but not particular bits of country, a love of country. And my Dad in particular, everyone else would go to the beach for holidays, we'd jump in the little caravan, tour rural Victoria and we'd love the small towns and we'd delight in the bakeries and we'd find Lerderdurg National Park, or the Alps, and we'd find farmers that he liked. He always saw the country as a whole thing, made up of different bits. So 20 years later I came over to Western Australia, and hit the south-west, and I hit the woodlands and I hit the heathlands, and the Mallee, and just bang, captured, immediate. So ethical base, appreciation of whole landscapes, and this particular unbelievable part of the world which has become my part of the world.

Peter Luscombe: It makes you really think about what is it all about, and why are we doing this. To me, it's basically the expansion of the human race, and whether I agree with that or not, we're having a profound effect on nature around the planet, and really affecting the atmosphere and the oceans, and this is an ongoing thing. We've triggered something here, and we haven't seen the end of it yet. So you really do have to ask why are we doing this, we've taken on this direction and we're on a pretty wild trip I think.

Simon Smale: I can remember seeing the first moon landing, and the excitement at that time in the 1960s when I think there really was a widespread view that we could continue to move on in the sort of pioneering fashion, there's always somewhere to move on to, even if that was into outer space. And so it didn't really matter what the trail and the weight behind us looked like, that we were leaving, that these days we're coming again to understand that this is where we have to live, that we actually have to cultivate and nurture the garden that's all around us very carefully, because it's all that we have, and there really is nowhere new to move on to.

Sylvia Leighton: So many of the landholders that went out there and pioneered the land, clearing it for agricultural development, I think again after the event, realised possibly some of the mistakes we had made, and ethically that doesn't sit very well with a lot of them. They do feel that we caused huge ecological detriment to that environment, and sometime there is a responsibility to try and turn that around. It's not a debt that we can pass on to the next generation, it's something we have to try and slow its decline and stabilise it, and hopefully the next generations will come up with some really clever ideas on how to farm these areas better.

Bill Bunbury: Tell me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me the height of your trees here look, if anything, higher than the average height of trees in the district. Am I right in that?

Kingsley Vaux: Yes, well these yates do grow quite tall and of course when they've got a huge amount of fresh water they do very well, and this country's pretty solid. We've got a lot of salmon gum just to the west of here too, it's quite fertile soil.

Bill Bunbury: You've obviously learnt a lot in the last 20 or so years about how the country works best. You've had to really find out by trial and error?

Kingsley Vaux: Oh, yes, and if I had another 100 years to live, I'd probably learn, probably know the answers to a lot of it, but yes, trial and error's been the thing.

Bill Bunbury: Has that been a good journey?

Kingsley Vaux: An interesting one, I suppose, yes. I suppose you always learn from your mistakes. Yes, an interesting journey I guess.

Carina Wyborn: What is the purpose of this? Why are we doing it, what is it that is motivating the individual people who are involved in these projects to do this? The government seems to think that if we pay landholders, they'll be more inclined to do stewardship things on their land. For some it's like Well OK, you should be paying us for what we're doing, but for others it's not about the money, because the amount of money that the government is able to pay them is nothing relative to the cost involved, and they do it because they love it. They do it because it's important and because they value what they're doing.

Bill Bunbury: You're with Encounter on ABC Radio National, and I'm with Carina Wyborn from the ANU College of Medicine. She's currently studying the relationship of land to human health and wellbeing.

For Carina, a sense of country is inside all of us.

Carina Wyborn: I think that landscape is unavoidably an internal thing. Everybody looks on this country and sees different things. You know, you and I are sitting in this park right now, and we'll be noticing different aspects of the park. The country which you see is very much a product of your upbringing, your world view, your position in life, where you're at, and you know, I have a very special plot of land which my family have owned for a long time, and when I'm in that landscape, nothing that I can use to put words towards it will describe the attachment that I have to it. And when I go there with people, they see a completely different space to me, and I can go to a similar patch of country, same eco type, same vegetation communities, and it won't look the same as that place to me, because place is so much more than its component parts, place and landscape.

Bill Bunbury: That sounds in a way like an Aboriginal view of My Country.

Carina Wyborn: Yes. Which again I think goes back to what I was saying before about this perception that White Australia had no attachment to place, and I think that urban Australia has an attachment to place. I mean the community of people centred around Merri Creek in Melbourne, is fascinating. It's a vibrant environmental cohort of people yet you walk down Merri Creek and it looks a lot better than it probably did before they came along, but it's definitely, I wouldn't want to go swimming in there, you know, there's a lot of rubbish, there's a lot of - there's probably a lot of weird bacteria living in there, yet people have rallied around this area and they have a very strong attachment to Merri Creek, and that's just a fairly unattractive little creek running through a big city.

Sylvia Leighton: I suppose the environment has never been separated from my being, and that must have again been part of growing up. As a child, being out in the bush all of the time, that must just seep into your being as a person and yes, I have a great love of the earth and nature, and seem to have maybe a little bit more consciousness of that interconnection between the earth's health and human health. Some people seem very separated from that, and think that we can do anything to it. I have a great belief if we take it to a point where many of the species collapse, we will possibly collapse along with it.

Annie Brandenberg: I wish in fact that human nature could be content with not touching and not doing, and just leaving some places alone, just like our soul, excepting that there are places that we don't have to - it's nice to know about them but I don't think we have to go there all the time.

Sylvia Leighton: Somehow whether it's nature energy or is it earth energy, infiltrates you and you do develop, if you've lived in the bush quite a long time, a great reverence of somehow the energy happening there. I suppose it's been so many events that have occurred to me when I've been in the bush, sometimes I think way beyond coincidence and it has made me think Is there a spiritual presence here? And you know, even if there isn't, I think nature is just so complex and so fragile and so beautiful, it's worth having a spiritual connection and reverence for it.

Eugene Eades: Look, when you talk about spirituality, Noongar people in the Koorang, Menang and Weelmun country, and in many, many other areas of the landscape as well, we believed in the one we called Mamon. Mamon was our spiritual provider; Mamon was the one that gave us the guidance to learn about what was needed to happen in the way to become a caretaker. He gave us the wisdom to be caretakers over country, animals, waters, and so forth. But Mamon, if you can interpret Mamon into the word God, well they are the same.

Peter Luscombe: I think I've just come to the conclusion that basically all religions probably come back to the law of nature, and you know, if there was one God, it's probably Mother Nature, that all humans, all religions are part of nature, and everything comes back to the law of nature, and we shouldn't really forget that, because without some sort of natural equilibrium, none of us can survive on the planet.

Bill Bunbury: We're increasingly aware of the fragility of the planet. Do you think this is altering our view of religion?

Keith Bradby: I think there's been a lot of forces influencing the Western view of religion at least, and deeply affecting its relevance in our society. I mean my personal journey is from a little boy whose Mum reckoned had to go to Sunday School because it was the respectable thing to do. To an adult who sees organised religion like that as not a positive force, locking us into very negative views. I mean you get out here in a bit of bush and the vastness of Western Australia I think is really good at this. You look at both the huge horizons the big sky, the 250-million years of continuous biological forces that have been in play around you, and you look at your feet and you see immense detail in the little shrubs and herbs forcing their way through and the little trigger plant just bursting into flower in a way that matches a wasp that's going to come and pollinate it, and you realise that I'm not that really all that important. And there is something quite magnificent playing around me. To me, it's not just a matter of being a bit more humble about who we are in not seeking dominion over the earth, but also realising that there is great mystery in how all this works together, and I am not going to understand that mystery. And I think for me, organised religion is not quite a coward's way out, but on the way there where you invent ways of understanding the mystery, the mystery is a bloody great mystery and I'm comfortable living with it as an interplay of forces that I'll never understand much at all. That's fine, as long as I'm not knocking things around much.

Eugene Eades: The old saying of Noongars are that you could take the Noongar out of the country but you can't take the country out of the Noongar. I've been one that was removed from this country for 21 years myself through policies of the past. I came back, and I've had very little contribution made to me by any of our elders about country, but since being out on country I'm learning the language, it's coming to me.

Keith Bradby: If there was any slogan that I personally would run with Gondwanalink, now we have two Vs of ibises. They almost did sort of circle us and decide to keep going the way they were originally going. Two flights of straw-neck ibis, started to go overhead then circled and go back out. And I wonder why. I think if there's any slogan I'd run with Gondwanalink, for personal reasons, it's embrace complexity. The social world, the ecological world is incredibly complex and I don't so much as want to gouge it and dig at it and understand it, I just want to enjoy it. I want to go towards greater health and resilience and be more supportive of the mystery and the complexity and I'm going to work in amongst it and not understand a lot of it, but I've got to know with a certain amount of certainty that the steps I'm taking support this thing.

Eugene Eades: I believe that we've turned the corner. I believe that the way forward for all of us to make sure that we get things right into the past and into the future, there has been a change in commitment and a working together to learn and share about both ways forward. It's about learning how to go forward into the future; it's about many cultures, sharing different ideas on the one land.

Keith Bradby: Last week I'm in Kalgoorlie, and had a delightful day at Widgiemooltha which is a barely-existing settlement an hour or so south of Kal. And you're in red dirt, and you know, vibrant orange, green trunks of trees and gnarled and old and those shiny leaves and the big sky and the big sunsets. Now I'm sitting on the south coast with you and it's a bit of a hazy grey day, we're looking at the blue ocean and at our feet is Hakea Trifacarta behind us and acacia, I couldn't even give you the name of that, you know, a whole heap of stuff flowering, and yesterday, I was over in the Karri forest and those great big gleaming trunks. What I understand now more and more every day is the fact that I'm not looking at or talking about three separate landscapes, I'm talking about one landscape. It's not broken up, or at least it wasn't broken up until we arrived. I thought I understood wholeness, I now know I understand wholeness a lot more, and I reckon give me another ten or twenty years and I'll understand it a whole lot more, again.

Bill Bunbury: That notion of wholeness suggests feeling?

Keith Bradby: Oh yes. And it presupposes a recognition of making ill, taking away health. Again, at the risk of sounding either arrogant or facetious or some other rude word, we have formally apologised as a nation to the Aboriginal people of Australia for shall we say both our mistakes and our intentional wrongs. And I don't think we have yet formally apologised to the country as a whole for our clumsiness and our mistakes and our intentional damage. And I think when you work on something like Gondwanalink and you say 'Look, over 1,000 kilometres we've ripped it asunder and broken the essential links', at some point you do have to apologise to the land or at least do those things which help atone for those wrongs.

EUGENE EADES SINGS 'I'll Help You'

Bill Bunbury: You've been listening to Taking Down the Fences

Technical production today, Ian Manning.

My thanks to Keith Bradby, and Simon Smale from Gondwanalink, Eugene Eades and all the other contributors who gave their time and thoughts for this program.And don't forget you can receive a transcript of this Encounter or listen to a podcast of the program.Just go online to:-www.abc.net.au/religion and follow the prompts.